HTC Desire X review

Wired rating

Wired

Tired

Screen could be more sensitive, sluggish processor, not very
distinctive

Price

£230

Stepping into the slightly worn shoes of the original HTC Desire comes the Desire X, with a flurry of improvements
for not much in the way of extra cost.

It's on sale now for around £230.

Design
Rather like the iPhone, recent HTCs have all had a very similar
look to them, and at first glance the Desire X looks little
different to HTC's current hero handset, the One X, or indeed the lower specced One V. Look a little closer though, and there have been a few
changes. Size-wise, it's between the two, with a 4-inch screen
compared to the One X's 4.7-inch and the One V's 3.7-inch.

Unlike the One X you can also remove the (rather flimsy)
backplate to get at the battery and there's the option of adding up
to 32GB of microSD card to augment the 4GB of memory already on
board, of which you can only use about 1GB. As with other recent
HTCs, you get the offer of 25GB of Dropbox cloud storage space --
only for two years though, after that you'll have to pay.

There's also a distinctive looking brushed aluminium plate
around the camera lens and LED flash, which doesn't appear to serve
any purpose other than making it look a bit different.

Features
The 4-inch LCD screen is nice and bright, and fairly sharp too
with a resolution of 800x400 pixels. But the glass covering sits a
little uncomfortably within the casing, and it nestles slightly
below the surround, which feels a bit awkward. The screen isn't as
sensitive as it could be either, and uncharacteristically for HTC,
we found ourselves having to make more repeat presses than we'd
like.

It's running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich -- still fairly rare
for a fresh midrange handset. It also has the latest 4.1 version of
HTC's Sense user interface, which is as slick and fulsome as we've
come to expect.

Performance
There's a dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8225 Snapdragon processor on
board, backed by 768MB RAM, which isn't bad for this price range.
It benchmarked a performance score of 4,969 with AnTuTu, which puts
it a nudge in front of Samsung's Galaxy Beam but behind the Huawei Ascend P1. In practise, there were occasional signs of
lag when opening new apps, especially when you have a few open
already.

Music and movie playback gets a bit of help from Beats Audio
processing technology, which boosts your volume and your bass --
fine if you like that sort of thing, but if you don't you can
always disable it. This is a stripped-down version of the
technology, with no graphic equaliser, and you won't find any Beats
Audio headphones in the box either.

The 5-megapixel camera is standard at this price point, but this
one has a few extras borrowed from its more expensive brother.
There's a BSI (Backside Illuminated) sensor that helps with
low-light snaps as well as an f2.0 aperture, which should let in a
bit more light. It has autofocus, as well as a burst mode which can
take up to 30 quick-fire snaps in a row if you hold the shutter
button down for long enough. And the features keep coming, with
face detection and auto smile capture, plus HDR to help with
high-contrast shots and a panorama mode. You can also take snaps
while you're in the middle of filming video.

Speaking of video, recording drops to WVGA resolution (800x480
pixels), so it's certainly not HD, though the fact that it records
at 30fps means it looks pretty good. Picture quality overall is
only so-so though, with a lack of detail in many snaps.

The battery held up fairly well, all told, delivering a little
over a day of fairly heavy use.

Conclusion The HTC Desire X is a perfectly decent midrange handset
but is let down by its insensitive screen and it doesn't really do
a lot to distinguish itself from rivals in this space, like the Galaxy Ace 2, Sony Xperia P or Orange San Diego.